Darryl McMahon wrote:Actually, I've done some x-y correlation research in my day, and while it's been a while, the text of the book rings true with my experience. It strikes me that Levitt has done a reasonable job of substantiating his conclusions, as much as anyone can in the social sciences where running conscious control populations can be tricky. However, he's done a pretty good job of finding reasonable controls for comparisons from data typically collected for other purposes. I'm not ready to concede the point to you. The argument presented in the book didn't seem convincing to me because there are too many other factors that influence crime rates. Others have also questioned Mr. Levitt's analysis. For instance: http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5246700 Now the following words come from Christopher Foote from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, but they underscore my point pretty well: " " But now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston are taking aim at the statistics behind one of Mr. Levitt's most controversial chapters. Mr. Levitt asserts there is a link between the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s and the drop in crime rates in the 1990s. Christopher Foote, a senior economist at the Boston Fed, and Christopher Goetz, a research assistant, say the research behind that conclusion is faulty. " Long before he became a best-selling author, Mr. Levitt, 38 years old, had established a reputation among economists as a careful researcher who produced first-rate statistical studies on surprising subjects. In 2003, the American Economic Association named him the nation's best economist under 40, one of the most prestigious distinctions in the field. His abortion research was published in 2001 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, an academic journal. (He was the subject of a page-one Wall Street Journal story1 in the same year.) " The "Freakonomics" chapter on abortion grew out of statistical studies Mr. Levitt and a co-author, Yale Law School Prof. John Donohue, conducted on the subject. The theory: Unwanted children are more likely to become troubled adolescents, prone to crime and drug use, than are wanted children. When abortion was legalized in the 1970s, a whole generation of unwanted births were averted, leading to a drop in crime nearly two decades later when this phantom generation would have come of age. "The Boston Fed's Mr. Foote says he spotted a missing formula in the programming of Mr. Levitt's original research. He argues the programming oversight made it difficult to pick up other factors that might have influenced crime rates during the 1980s and 1990s, like the crack wave that waxed and waned during that period. He also argues that in producing the research, Mr. Levitt should have counted arrests on a per-capita basis. Instead, he counted overall arrests. After he adjusted for both factors, Mr. Foote says, the abortion effect disappeared. [Emphasis mine.] " "There are no statistical grounds for believing that the hypothetical youths who were aborted as fetuses would have been more likely to commit crimes had they reached maturity than the actual youths who developed from fetuses and carried to term," the authors assert in the report. " Correlating cause / effect relationships is a slippery business at best, and the biggest assumption Mr. Levitt made was that abortion eliminated a significant percentage of unwanted babies, who would, in turn, have become criminals because of their lack of familial love and guidance. However, statistics concerning illegitimate births in the US indicate a RISE after abortion was legalized. How can that correlate with "wantedness" and result in reduced crime? The whole exercise was mindless, in my view. (Neocons) Interesting perspective. I certainly did not see it that way. In fact, I would have thought NeoCons would have hated it. I suppose anyone can find something they like in here, but NeoCons and the whole book, that I don't see. Maybe my definition of NeoCons is off. I tend to associate them with the current White House crowd (Bush II, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc) and the American religious right. Those people use religion to promote a very secular agenda. To them, economics is twisted into a scheme that increases profit. Religion and pious-sounding talk serve to lull the masses to sleep. They're a hawkish bunch who promote "free trade" only when it suits them. (Don't get me started about softwood lumber!) My sister (and most of the people in my family, for that matter) fall quite nicely into the NeoCon camp. News that two American soldiers were recently tortured and brutally slain in Iraq brought outraged responses from solid, church-attending people who think that we ought to "bomb them all to hell" for this. Now the reason NeoCons in my family LOVE this book, is that they say Freakonomics lays out a persuasive case for monetary and tax policies that encourage current trends. Therefore, we don't need to worry about energy, global warming, a HUGE tax deficit and an overextended military. Concerns about these sorts of thing are so "old school" . . . That wasn't my take, but theirs. I disagree. I don't think morality has much of a relationship with economics, any more than physics. If a meteorite strikes the earth and kills people, that's reality that can be explained by physics, but I don't ascribe any morality to the event. Economics attempts to explain the actions of individuals relative to their choices in the use of resources. Levitt gives a couple of cases where the economic incentives are in conflict with the presumed moral choice. Which one wins depends on the individual. The take-away for me is that we should be doing a better job of aligning incentives with morality as a society, not putting them in conflict to see which wins. If that's your position, you are NOT disagreeing with me. Because economic issues center on human choice, it IS fundamentally rooted in one's sense of morality. I contend that the current paradigm puts short term profit over people, that the economic deck is stacked in favor of the wealthy, and that statistical analyses given to us every night on the news present a different story than the one faced by the vast majority of human beings alive on the planet. If we want to expend the effort, I'm sure we can get a reasonable estimate of how much it costs to destroy the environment, and human life and extracting wealth from the poor for the benefit of the rich. (That may come in a later post; I'm currently reading The Weather Makers by Flannery; in a word-terrifying.) Sounds like my kind of book! I trust you feel this direction is counter to your morality; it is counter to mine. So, I would not expend the effort on the accounting analysis. Economics is a tool, like a shovel. You can use a shovel to cultivate the garden, or stove in your neighbour's head. The shovel has no inherent morality. Economics can be used to our benefit (e.g. Schumacher) or our detriment (e.g. Reagan supply-side economics, and I would argue Friedman's monetarism - but that's another debate). So long as we permit social policies to incent action that is contrary to our morality, it is not the fault of economics that it can explain the mechanism or keep score; it is our fault for permitting the policy to remain in effect. Ah, I understand you now. I'm not faulting economics as a study, but rather as a means of perpetuating the status quo. The thing I hope most people take away from this book is to look past the "conventional wisdom", and think for themselves. That alone would be a great step forward. Most people I know who have read the book aren't thinking at all, and THAT is scary! robert luis rabello "The Edge of Justice" Adventure for Your Mind http://www.newadventure.ca Ranger Supercharger Project Page http://www.members.shaw.ca/rabello/ |
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